We finally saw "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" on dvd. I liked it pretty much, but not to the level of raving about it. I liked Mr. Tumnus a lot, and I thought Lucy and Edmund were good. I thought Susan and Peter could have been better. The CG was okay--beavers were good, and Aslan was good. Liked the professor and the lamp post.

But.

It was really too post-LOTR for me. It's an *intimate* story, not an epic story--so it should be set in an intimate landscape, not a New Zealand-style Middle Earth landscape. The battle scene was pretty impressive (liked the phoenix), but again, it was too big. Thinking of the Horse and His Boy--Rabadash w/200 men is a BIG DEAL for the Narnians--so we don't need a cast of thousands for this battle scene. Plus Peter points his sword this way and that as if he thinks it's a gun.

I liked Edmund a whole lot, come to think of it. His character showed up on screen as most complex.

Part of the problem is that I like lots of the other Narnia volumes better than that one. Even as a kid Father Christmas being a feature in this other world kind of bugged me.

Yeah, I love Voyage of the Dawn Treader too--I can see everything that happens in that book so clearly.

My faith in God, as a child (w/areligious parents) was based on Puddleglum's speech to the serpent witch in The Silver Chair, when they're rescuing prince Rilian, though, so I also have a fondness for that book--and I like The Horse and His Boy and The Magician's Nephew too. Didn't care so much for Prince Caspian or The Last Battle, though there were parts in both those ones that I did like.

Was Tilda Swinton Lucy? If so, I agree! How old do you think she is in real life? (I know I can find this out with a Google search...)

Oh--my mother just told me that Tilda Swinton was the witch. I thought she was good too (my mom said she was good at "projecting both attraction and simultaneous threat") though I found her hairdo and costume distracting at times.

Really? I thought her hair was awesome. The only thing was I picutred her as being more natural, more "evil earth spirit" sort of thing, you know? Lucy was darling, though. Georgie Henley is her name, according to imdb. "Georgie". It totally fits her!

I guess I'm influenced by thinking of her in the context of The Magician's Nephew... also maybe I'm influenced by Pauline Baynes's illustrations...though really her illustrations of the witch were pretty poor, come to think of it.

I liked her best in the first scenes w/Edmund--but the battle scene was excellent too. As for the stone table scene... I think that's just too intense for me maybe--not just the movie, but the whole concept. (wimpy wimpy wimpy...)

I didn't know that about C.S. Lewis liking narrative poems. I'd like to like reading narrative poems--and sometimes I actually do--but it's an effort to begin to read them, if you know what I mean. But I like "The Eve of St. Agnes" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"--and the excerpts I read of "Paradise Lost" when I was in college were difficult but very cool.